Steve Bannon’s favorite book, “The Fourth Turning,” sure does seem to jibe pretty well with my own personal prediction — the United States is in for a severe political crisis no later than around (January) 2025.
And, yet, there’s a lot of that book that seems, I don’t know, historical bullshit. It seems as though they had a idea they wanted to sell and reverse engineered things to the point that what they already believed made sense.
For instance, they themselves say that their concept of “Turnings” can’t account for when the Civil War happened. But, to be fair, you could say that the unexpected deaths of both William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor may have have somehow sped up the Civil War so it didn’t happen according to macro trends. Whenever you try “psychohistory” you can’t account for how the life — or death — of one individual changes huge macro trends.
So, I dunno.
I think some of my annoyance comes from my belief that no one can predict the future and there’s no reveled truth. I don’t like the idea that people who are lazy just want to read The Fourth Turning and somehow think they’ve got everything figured out.
And, really, the only reason why The Fourth Turning has a shot at being extremely good at predicting the future is Donald Fucking Trump. He’s sort of the potential “Great Man” who could fucking destroy the United State simply by being himself.
Don’t put me on blast Kurt Schlichter! Or, as Briar Rabbit would say, “Please don’t throw me in that briar patch.”
The reason why people like me grow “hysterical” with our “doom shit” is once you slip into autocracy, the entire dynamic of your politics changes. Suddenly, there is no longer any ebb-and-flow to it. The government becomes unmoored from any sort of influence from the populace because, well, it’s an autocracy.
You can move policy on the edges, but, in general, if you live in an autocracy, whatever the autocrat wants is what you get. And because autocracy is EXTREMELY POPULAR with the MAGA New Right base, it’s easy to imagine once it becomes clear that the United States is no longer a traditional Western democracy that things might swerve into a pretty dark direction pretty quick.
Now, there are some aspects to all of this that have to be addressed.
There’s a good chance that once the United States is considered an autocracy….that huge swaths of the American electorate will deny this is, in fact, the case. Nothing will change for them, so fuck you, lib. And as long as things, in general, stay the same — and the new autocratic regime behaves itself — people like me will continue to be “hysterical.”
But there are about 50 years of bent up rage on the part of the MAGA New Right and it’s very, very easy to imagine that at some point in, say, 2025 President DeSantis or Cotton or Hawley begins to rant about how we absolutely HAVE to have a Constitutional Convention “to pass a balance budget amendment.”
And, because we’re now an autocracy, such a convention will be convened and it will transform the United States into something a lot more like Russia. And then that’s it.
It will be over. And people like me who can’t or won’t get the hint about the New Order will get pushed out a window or throw into a Trumplandia re-education camp. I will have been right all along and the only price I get will be a bullet in the back of the head by a an ICE agent.
Now, the conservative I know would say at this point “that’s not going to happen.” When I ask them how they know this, they will say, “it just won’t.” In other words, they are resting all their assumptions on the “hope” that our new autocratic rulers will abide by the much maligned democratic “norms” that conservative have been attacking for a decade or so now.
And, of course, in the end, it won’t be until things get personal that the conservatives I know will have a “come to Jesus” moment. Then it will be too late. Then we’re living in autocratic America and I’m dead in a ditch somewhere — still very right, though!
But, how likely is it that our new autocratic overlords would abuse their unlimited power? Isn’t it possible that while Republicans will have a lock on power for the foreseeable future that they will be sure to stay within a spectrum of actions that would not rile up the “Good Germans” that would be the bedrock of their power.
This is a very good question. I suppose it’s possible that what might happen is that, yes, we’ll become a white Christian ethno state, but President Hawley will have the good graces not to purge the media. He’ll let Twitter liberals vent all they like, but because they’re so fucking powerless, from his point of view, it’s all a lulz.
I guess the difference between myself and the conservatives in my life is I would rather not have to trust insane MAGA New Right cocksuckers being gracious enough to not kill me because I absolutely won’t fucking shut up about what a piece of shit President Hawley is. They shoot writers, don’t they?
The above is a tipping point for me. It proves to me that my dystopian hellscape for late 2024 – early 2025 is probably pretty close to being accurate. As such, the time for hysterics is over. The time for “hope” is over.
The era of preperation has begun.
Now, I absolutely hate violence — hell, conflict — of any sort. I don’t want to hurt anyone for any reason. But I’m a survivor. And, in my experience, the key to surviving a crisis is to recognize that one exists.
We’re in a crisis.
It’s kind of downlow right now because we’re an autocracy without an autocrat, but we’re careening towards a stunning political crisis at some point between now and January 2025.
Now, things won’t be exactly like 2020 because the person who would be certifying the vote would be a Democrat, Vice President Harris. But that’s pretty late in the game.
Republicans — I see you Roger Stone — are actively taking a shiv to local voting boards. And if they can’t corrupt the system there, they’ll do it at the state level and if they don’t succeed in fucking things up there, they’ll object again in Congress, hoping they can throw things in some way to the House and Senate.
The point is — the above memo is a smoking gun for me. Republicans really are out to destroy our liberal democracy and we all need to start acting accordingly. I don’t write for VOX, so, lulz, I have no idea what that means in real terms.
But I do know that anyone who starts telling me they “hope” this or that thing will save us has lost me. We’re dealing with macro trends that don’t have any easy answers like “vote” or “get involved.” When you’re dealing with an opposing political force that has come to glorify political violence and, worst of all, cheats, well, what can you really do?
I don’t know.
But you can’t do nothing. You have about four years to prepare. Use your time wisely.
Ok. This is going to take some brain power. But, here goes. When it comes to COVID, I think the MAGA New Right thinks (I use that term loosely) that it was designed in a lab in Wuhan and, as such, we should PRAISE Son Of God Donald Trump for the vaccine, but we shouldn’t take it to own the libs.
And, lib, you never know, it’s possible this is all a “plandemic” in the sense that it was big pharma who was funding the “gain of function” research in Wuhan and you don’t KNOW that Dr. Fauchi isn’t profiting personally from it, now do you? Something something something Jewish space lasers
.
Any change in behavior — however minor — to manage the pandemic is a brutal attack on lady liberty because “my body, my choice” and also you’re excited that Roe is going to be overturned soon.
To take the free vaccine would would somehow be a win to the libs and to Red China, so take Regeneron or horse dewormer instead. There can never be “Vaccine passports” or, God forbid, a vaccine mandate, even though there are a variety of existing vaccine mandates that have been on the books for generations.
The difference is mumble mumble mumble the politics are different mumble mumble and fuck you, lib.
Nothing short of reparation from China will do when it comes to COVID. And, if that doesn’t work, then nuke them and let Trump ride one of the bombs like Slim Pickins in Dr. Strangelove.
And, in the end, it’s all about “personal responsibility” and if the fucking lib still won’t shut up, just tell them “no it won’t” and claim that all the facts that they use are “bogus.”
I’ve been reluctant to write about all of this because I don’t really know a lot about it, but from what I do know….we all need to sit up and take notice. Two events are beginning to bubble up to the surface — one in China, the other here in the good old USA.
So, from what I understand it there’s a huge fucking company in China called Evergrande that has defaulted on a massive amount of loans. Something like $US800 Million. The fear is, of course, that this will cause a massive shockwave throughout the global economy.
Meanwhile, because of fucking MoscowMitch in the United States, there’s a real possibility that we’re going to fail to raise the debt ceiling and we’re going to default on our own payments. (Or something — I’m kind of fuzzy on the specifics of what exactly would happen.)
But the point is — this could all be the set up for a one-two punch against the global economy, already weakened by COVID19. For once, I’m not going to assume the absolute worst will happen.
I do think, however, that at the moment, at least, Republicans are prepared to crash the global economy to “own the libs.” Such a catastrophe would be a setup for a MAGA landslide in fall 2022 and then, fuck you lib, we’ll win 2024 and finally turn the United States into the autocracy we’ve all assumed it would become.
But, I just don’t know. This is really a very dark scenario. And we all know that nothing bad has ever happened to a country because of a depression. Lulz! I wish we skip the potentially scary part and go straight to where we have Truth & Reconciliation Trials in, say, Mobile, Alabama.
All know is, there is the POTENTAL for a massive, stunning self-induced economic clusterfuck this fall.
I know that I sound hysterical. I know that seem to love peddling my own version of “fear porn” and “doom shit.” But we have to admit that no one is going to save us. There will be no “boom” that takes down the entire rotten, fetid Trumplandia edifice. (That this is a mirror image of MAGA Far Right discussions on Twitter about The Durham Report should tell you something.)
But one thing that is going on all around us is our politics has frozen up. We’ve reached a point in negative polarization where the two sides are absolutely opposed to anything the other side supports. As such, outside of a few highly educated NeverTrumper thinkers, there is no and will never be common cause against MAGA. There will never be a broad United Front formed to save our faltering democracy.
In short — we’re fucked.
And there are two, maybe three endgames to this. Either we slide peacefully into autocracy, a military junta takes over…or we have a civil war.
It’s this last option that MAGA New Right thought leaders become so giddy over. They keep saying that because “liberals won’t leave them alone,” they are going to have to turn to political violence. Their thinking is — liberal progressives are all soyboy milquetoasts who will be crush by their Alpha Male prowess.
This is such a fucking dumb thing to think.
I say this AGAIN because human nature is such that even a “sissy boy” is going to grow a lot more “alpha” if things grow existential. So, it seems to me the MAGA New Right cocksuckers who think Blue States will “collapse like a rotten door” will be in for a pretty rude awakening if things got so bad that we had a civil war.
But there is one thing to consider — WMD.
If we have a civil war, we’re probably going to bomb ourselves into oblivion.
Do I really have to do this? Apparently, so, since I’ve gotten at least one ping from some rando in Texas who definitely seems interested in making my fears about Sept 18 come true. (I think they may have shared my recent post on the subject.)
Given that, let’s run the worse case scenario for what might happen this weekend.
There are a lot of known unknowns. One is, the amount of organization on the part of the protesters and their intent. Do they intend to do a replay of what happened on Jan 6th, or are they just angry and what to prove a point? The key issue is how organized they are and if they have it in them to storm the Capitol again.
A fence is being up around the Capitol, so if this weekend’s protesters freaked out, at least they would have to get past that. It could be that they just want to, in general, fuck shit up. That they don’t want something as grant as taking the Capitol, just cause problems.
So, a lot — A LOT — of problems would have to go wrong for the Capitol to be seized again. And, really, if they took the Capitol, the key issue would what they did with once they got it. If they take the Capitol again, they would need a security perimeter around the Capitol. And from what I can tell, they just don’t have the people to establish such a perimeter.
As such, I think while there may be violence this weekend, relative to what happened on Jan 6th, will be a dud.
The key issue with the January 6th attack on the Capitol was the element of surprise. It just did not even occur to anyone outside of far Right circles that anything was even possible. So when it happened, there was not enough security and what security there was, was not prepared and was easily over run.
As such, I seriously doubt there will be anything like what happened on January 6th at this weekend’s Sept 18th protest near the Capitol. I guess it’s still possible, it’s just not probable. And, really, if they did manage to do it again, they really need to put some more forethought into revolt’s security around the Capitol once they seize it.
If they can just have some order to their bonkers Hail Mary Pass move, they could join the Paris Commune in the history books as surreal political events. But these guys, thankfully, remain just a political grunt. And if they’re that organized to think about things like that, then we’re REALLY in trouble.
So, what I think will happen is the whole thing will give us PTSD from January 6th, but in the end it will be a lulz. That, at least, it what I think — hope — will be the maximum extent of any problems.
At the moment, ding-dong Trump AGAIN holds the entire fate of the United States in his teeny-tiny hands. I say this because we face a far different future if someone else is the Republican nominee in 2024 than we do if it’s him. If its DeSantis or Cotton or Hawley or Pompeo, then we’re probably going to slip peacefully into some form of autocracy.
Good German Republicans will call people like me hysterical as we slowly — then not so slowly — begin to lose some rights that we’ve assumed we’d always have. Everything will come to a head when the argument of the day is if we’re going to have a MAGA-themed Constitutional Convention or not. It will be pitched to traditional American conservatives as the “only way” to pass a balanced budget amendment.
Then, lulz, fuck you, lib, it goes rouge and I definitely end up dead at the hands of a ICE agent.
But if Trump runs again, he is soooooo fucking stupid and incompetent that he could single handedly force the United States into a civil war. And it’s going to be Blue States who leave the Union. Remember, a lot — and I mean A LOT — of things would have to go wrong for us to get to that point.
The U.S. Military would have to sit back and let Blue States hold Secession Conventions. But, maybe they will.
Anyway, if it is Blue States who leave the Union (or try) and California stays with the Blue State Union then we’re probably going to bomb ourselves into oblivion using WMD.
I keep talking about this hysterical “doom shit” because Republicans are radicalized and so anti-democratic at this point that what else is going to happen? Why would anyone thing anything else is going to happen?
It seems as though the people who think I peddle political disaster porn either think the law is going to save us, or they tacitly agree with the coming autocracy we may face.
All I know, something’s gotta give. At some point the modern day Slave Power of MAGA either gets its way and establishes an white Christian ethno state, or there’s a civil war and (hopefully) its gaping wound gets cauterized.
What to make of shit like this. You see two types of reactions on Twitter to this billboard in Georgia that suggests that Trump is, well, Jesus Christ. On one hand, you have people who laugh at it. And on the other you have people who are freaked out by it.
Without knowing how this billboard came out, I’m of the general opinion that artifacts of Trumplandia like this are one big troll. The person who thought it up and paid for it wants nothing more than to “own the libs” by evoking the very reaction that they got.
I see this type of froth a lot these days in Far Right circles. They’re like a snake eating its tail. They do and say some pretty fucked up shit because their negative polarization is extreme, so absolute that they want to make it clear that you, the lib, have been owned for good.
Personally, I think this type of bizarre behavior is a reflection of how macro trends in our dying Republic are warping our politics. Or, even more ominous — our politics are now dead. Not only is there literally nothing Trump could do to change the mind of the average MAGA person, even if that did happen, they would just piviot to one of the dozen or so other would-be autocrats who want to finish the job that Trump started.
In other words, we’re fucked.
We’re totally, completely, f u c k e d.
Things are going to come to a head no later than January 2025. That’s when we find out if we’re going to slip peacefully into autocracy or if we’re going to bomb ourselves into oblivion.
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